


Midnight Tea

by RosalindInPants



Category: The Great Library Series - Rachel Caine
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Bonding over past trauma, Gen, Memories, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Talking, discussion of Rome, discussion of canon torture, discussion of the Iron Tower
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 04:13:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29004285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RosalindInPants/pseuds/RosalindInPants
Summary: Recovery will be a long process after everything he's been through, but Wolfe is making progress. More importantly, he is finding that there are people he can talk to when he's having a hard time. One night, Wolfe visits Eskander for tea and help working through some intrusive memories of Qualls. Eskander's trauma isn't exactly the same as Wolfe's, but they have enough in common to help each other.
Relationships: Christopher Wolfe & Eskander
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Midnight Tea

**Author's Note:**

> “We’re old friends, you and I. I’ve been with you in your darkest moments. I’ve cleaned your wounds. I’ve listened to you weep.” Qualls, Smoke and Iron.

EPHEMERA

**An exchange of Codex messages between Scholar Christopher Wolfe and Obscurist Magnus Eskander. Marked private.**

_Are you awake?_

Yes. Have you found a new book for me? Or shall I send the carriage?

_The carriage. Please._

* * *

They have established something of a routine in these insomniac meetings. There is tea, already brewed and ready to pour as soon as Wolfe arrives in his father’s Iron Tower apartment. At first, he could not understand why Eskander would continue to live in that place, but now he thinks he does. It is not, as Eskander claims, a matter of convenience, but one of reclaiming, not so very different than his own Lighthouse office. So much has been taken from both of them. They take back what they can.

Eskander pours, and Wolfe sits across from him at the little table by the window. They both find it pleasant to look at the stars. Against all common sense but by mutual agreement, they drink real tea, _Camellia sinensis,_ no chamomile, no soporific herbs for their sleepless nights. The first time they met, it was over a pleasant enough Ceylon, but they have since learned more of one another’s tastes. Tonight it is a lovely, delicate white, subtly floral. One of his favorites, and one of his father’s as well. 

Forty years apart, and they still find so many of these points of similarity. They like the same teas, the same songs, the same poets. It is as if some invisible thread has been strung between them all these years. He wonders, sometimes, what it would have been like to grow up at his father’s side, but that is useless speculation. It could never have happened that way.

The tea makes a fine complement to the assortment of macarons piled on a plate beside the teapot. As far as Wolfe knows, the Iron Tower’s cooks are skilled as ever, but small irregularities in shape suggest that these are of his father’s own making. Improbably, Eskander has taken up baking, even going so far as to have a kitchen installed in his apartment. He has some talent for it, Wolfe has to admit.

On some nights, they talk of reading and research and the weather and never raise the subject of the traumas that connect them as much as literature or tea. Sometimes, it is enough to be in the company of one similarly broken. Tonight, however, is not one of those nights. Reluctantly, Wolfe has learned that some thoughts are better spoken, dragged out from the haunted corners of his mind and thrust into the open air where, like the phantoms that they are, they will disperse.

It takes a while to find the words, but he does find them. That, too, is getting easier with time. “Tonight’s mental aberration is an interesting one,” he says. It is easier to speak of things this way, as an object of curiosity, than to confess to his scars as though they were sins.

“Let’s hear about it, then,” Eskander says and tops off their cups. There is something gentle in his father’s tone, just beneath the academic curiosity he affects. Eskander does care, in his way. Not so fiercely as Nic, who feels the hurt as deeply as Wolfe does when they talk of the prison, nor so detached as the Medica counselors to whom he is more a duty than a man. It is exactly the right sort of distance for nights like this.

Wolfe picks up another macaron, mostly for something to do with his hand. “A variation on the intrusion of memories, triggered by physical contact. The memories themselves are… not the worst, but the timing and circumstances can be… inconvenient.” These words, he planned. Rehearsed in the carriage, though that makes the thought no easier to voice. It comes out as well as he could hope. General enough to obscure the humiliating details, specific enough to spark the kind of conversation that will neutralize the thought pattern. 

But Eskander surprises him, as his father often does. “You mean when you’re in bed with Nic?” His tone is neutral; neither mocking nor accusatory. A touch of sympathy, even understanding, on his face.

And with that, anything even resembling a plan has gone off the rails, and Wolfe can only look out at the night sky and say, “Yes. And at other times as well, but tonight, yes.”

Eskander shrugs, a twitch of motion in the corner of Wolfe’s eye. “If it helps, that sort of experience is not uncommon here in the Iron Tower. You can probably guess the cause.”

The breeding program. Another sordid chapter of the Great Library’s recent history, and one of many reasons Wolfe has to thank the gods for sparing him from the dubious blessing of inheriting his parents’ power. 

Sometimes he weighs his year beneath Rome against his father’s decades in this gilded cage, and he wonders which of them suffered greater torment at the Library’s hands. But what did it matter whether a stone was swept away in an instant by floodwaters or worn down by slow erosion? The end result was no different. Still, he does not think he would trade his father’s fate for his own. It would have destroyed him to live under a tyranny so intimate and personal.

“There is a certain strange logic to it as a response to the things that they did to us,” Eskander says, pulling Wolfe from the Scylla and Charibdis of his thoughts.

And suddenly, without logical reason, Wolfe is gripped by the implications of “us,” and the urgent need to differentiate between the forms of the Library’s cruelty. “Yes. I can see that,” he says, a touch too sharp. He sighs, shakes his head. “But that isn’t relevant in my case. I was never…” It’s only a word, not even a long one, but he can’t say it. Saying it, even to deny its reality, seems too much like tempting fate, given his overactive imagination. He doesn’t want his nightmares to include _that._ “Qualls wasn’t Gregory,” he says instead, knowing his father will understand.

“Fortunate, I suppose. One Gregory was already too many.” Eskander frowns. Sips his tea. 

Wolfe does the same, with the unsettling sense that he is looking in a mirror. Seeing his own expressions, his own mannerisms, reflected back. He really does have his father’s hair, his father’s eyes, just as his mother told him all those years ago. Given a few more years, he will have the same lines at the corners of his mouth, the same crease in his brow.

“And I am glad that there was at least that one violation you were spared,” Eskander says. It’s measured, careful, exactly right and exactly wrong.

“I don’t come here for pity,” Wolfe says, glaring. The macaron in his hand is crushed, and there is no dignified way to dispose of it short of sneaking it into a robe pocket, which is entirely too childish. He settles for using his other hand to bring the broken pieces one by one to his mouth. Slowly.

“No, you come for my spectacular conversational skills,” Eskander replies with an all-too-familiar smile. “So it isn’t a direct connection between past and present. I assume you want to work out the trigger, since you aren’t here for sympathy.”

Sympathy and pity aren’t the same thing, Wolfe has half a mind to argue. There is always a certain appeal to distracting pedantry. He gives that impulse no more regard than it deserves and says, “That would be preferable, yes.”

“Let us start with the memory itself,” Eskander says, with enough assurance that it is almost possible to forget that he is no more an authority on this than Wolfe himself. But he continues, and it is again evident that they are only two broken men, muddling together through the arduous process of patching their cracks. “That is, if it is one you are willing to share.”

_Willing_ is such a strange word to use in reference to this subject. Wolfe is, as always, of two minds, at once wanting to print every gruesome detail and force all the world to face what the Library was, and wanting to bury it all so deeply that even he himself can never again find it. He knows, of course, that the latter is as impossible as the former is unbearable, but he still finds himself deflecting, mostly by reflex. “It isn’t a single memory. More a pattern…” He stops himself with a sip of tea. Forces himself to drag the fetid, lurking thing from its hole. “A representative sample may suffice. The instigator of tonight’s unrest.”

Eskander nods and refills their cups. He gives no sign of impatience, but then, Eskander is nothing if not patient. In that, they are the opposite poles of a magnet.

“I have told you how he could be kind, as a counterpoint to the cruelty. A manipulation,” Wolfe begins. He doesn’t name the torturer. Little superstitions soothe the mind at times like this. He turns toward the window, watches the clouds drift across the stars, finds the necessary distance to move from general explanation to specific incident. It is one that has painted itself vividly on the blurry canvas of that year.

He hears his own voice, but he scarcely feels his lips moving. “On this occasion, the guards handled the brutality. I was taken from my cell. Chained. Beaten. They didn’t ask any questions. _He_ did. I was half senseless when he came. I couldn’t see him. My back was to the door. But I knew him. The sound of his feet, his breathing. I could hardly breathe for fear of him, but he didn’t hurt me. He had cool cloth that he used to wipe away the blood while he asked his questions. It was very gentle.”

Those are the torturer’s words, caught like a hook in his memory, and his voice catches. His heart pounds against the tight wall of his ribs. He wants to moisten his bone-dry mouth with a sip of tea, but his hands are shaking. He can hear the rasp of the man’s voice, even now. 

_“You remember how I asked you questions, don’t you? Sometimes it was very gentle. Those were the good times.”_

No. That wasn’t real, only a patchwork stitched together by his broken mind from shreds of memory and exhaustion and terror. Proof right there that it is long past time he lanced this festering boil. Hands curling into fists, he clears his throat and makes himself tell the tale to its conclusion. “It’s hazy after that. He helped me back to my cell. There was a blanket. I remember the blanket.” He doesn’t have words for what it meant to have a blanket in that place. He swallows the lump in his throat. “The other memories that have been troublesome as of late are much the same. Small kindnesses. Times it wasn’t entirely terrible.”

“Wasn’t it?” Eskander asks, very softly. “Terrible relative to what? To the worst he did to you? That seems a skewed comparison, don’t you think?”

Irritation, Wolfe has found, makes a powerful counter to the strange mix of dissociation and shame that inevitably accompanies these disclosures. He is beginning to wonder whether his father provokes him on purpose. “Oh, yes,” he snaps, turning to glare at Eskander. “Because this is a rational and reasoned neurosis I am experiencing.”

Eskander never flinches from these barbs of Wolfe’s. He deflects, shaking his head and saying, “I’m not judging you, Christopher. After all, here I am still in love with your mother. I, of all people, know how senseless feelings can be.”

“That’s hardly comparable,” Wolfe says, sure now that the provocation is deliberate.

But the shadow of pain across Eskander’s face is all too real. “I was her prisoner,” he says, looking down at his cup. Four words, quiet as a knife between ribs.

It should not hurt so much, this understanding starting to form in Wolfe's mind. For most of his life, he thought his parents hated one another. He remembers the harsh snap of his mother’s anger when he asked about his father and the hollow places of his childhood where he missed a person he never knew. He remembers, too, more recently, the raw grief in Eskander’s voice at the memorial they held for Keria Morning, and the genuine fondness in his father’s eyes when Wolfe does something reminiscent of his mother. Even knowing all he does of the Iron Tower, he’d begun to think his parents had something at least similar in shape to what he has with Nic, but now he remembers the feeling of a warm blanket in the freezing dark and wonders if his father might understand after all.

Love is not the word he would use for that feeling. But he is not his father, and he knew love before he knew iron and stone. He knows so little of his father’s life before the tower, not that he has any intention to pry. There is an understanding between them that the past is not a book to be opened without invitation.

“I was her lover, too,” Eskander says, before Wolfe has finished sorting through his tangled assumptions and inferences. “It was never simple between us. It couldn’t be. I loved her, I hated her, I feared her and I feared for her, but you didn’t come here to listen to my old complaints. Nor should I speak ill of a mother to her son.”

At that, Wolfe can only shrug. “I take no offense. We weren’t close.” He is tempted to say more, if only because picking at the scars of his childhood is an interesting distraction from the painful process of probing his more recent wounds, but he sips his tea instead. What is only a dull ache to him might well be agony to his father. That isn’t a price worth paying to avoid discomfort that is both necessary and invited.

There is a gleam of sorrow in Eskander’s eyes as he says, “I know. This tower twisted everything that came within its walls. Though not so much as your Roman prison, I suspect.”

Such a clumsy redirection to their previous topic might be more annoying were it not so clear a sign of the invisible toll taken by forty years’ isolation. A reminder that his father, too, has been broken by captivity, something Wolfe understands all too well. The mere mention of the prison is enough to make Wolfe’s skin prickle with a phantom chill. He has to gulp down the last of his tea before the tremor returning to his hand can spill the liquid. The cup rattles against the saucer as he sets it down. His father is kind enough not to remark upon it.

Letting his hand rest on the table, Wolfe curls his fingers tight into his palm, until nails dig into skin. Nails, yes, he has nails. It helps to remember that, and to feel the slight pain that calls into focus the absence of other pains. “I will concede that you raised a valid point,” he says, pushing past his reluctance to subject himself to the same scrutiny he would turn on any other. “The standards by which I judge the things that happened there are skewed. That is a point of vulnerability worth considering.”

Eskander’s nod is a blur of movement above Wolfe’s field of vision, fixed as his gaze is on his empty cup. Small porcelain cups in the Chinese style, incongruous with the much larger and more utilitarian teapot. Wolfe watches the pot lift, observes the flow of pale golden tea from spout to cup. At this juncture most people Wolfe knows would speak, if only to encourage Wolfe to continue, but Eskander lets the silence settle over them with the ease of long experience. There is a certain warmth to it, like the fragrance of steaming tea.

Inwardly, Wolfe picks at threads loosened by the things he and his father have said. He isn’t sure that he likes what he glimpses beneath, something he hasn’t let himself see, but he knows it is better to tear the bandage off quickly. “Him, particularly, I judge with far more leniency than he deserves. What sense does that make? He tortured me. Drove me to madness. Nearly killed me.”

“But he was also kind,” Eskander fills in when Wolfe’s voice falters. “And whatever you might know of his motives and tactics, that influences your perception, doesn’t it?”

“He let me go.” It comes out as a whisper. Thin as a final breath, heavy as forbidden truth.

It _is_ true, though not especially forbidden. Many of the documents from the Library’s secret prisons are available to the public now, part of Khalila’s reforms. No consistent records were kept, but his case was unusual and recent enough that it is comparatively well-documented. There are his mother’s letters to the former Archivist, brimming with restrained rage that might be mistaken for maternal concern. Curia meeting notes, mercifully brief. And there is a report found in the office of the former Artifex Magnus, its first page giving explicit confirmation of what Wolfe was told when he was taken from his cell for the last time.

_I will not subject this prisoner to more pain. I have personally released Scholar Wolfe._

That one is filed under interdiction, to be published upon Wolfe’s death unless he grants consent for its release sooner. He has not yet decided what to do with it. Probably, he should have told Khalila to burn it. She might even have agreed, given its contents. Almost certainly, he should not have read it, but he has always preferred knowledge to ignorance, even if the confirmation of his memories did not prove to be worth the cost in nightmares. Not to mention its promotion of certain forms of irrational thinking.

“Yes, he released you. And that has meaning, whether you want it to or not,” Eskander says, unknowingly echoing Wolfe’s thoughts. “The mind often wants to assign people to the roles of hero and villain. It must be particularly frustrating that he cannot be so categorized.”

“That’s overly simplistic. Even the most primitive of dramas include more varied roles,” Wolfe can’t help but point out. Academic debate, particularly at this level of abstraction, makes for a comfortable retreat from the raw vulnerability of baring his heart’s inner workings. “Still, as a working model, it has some utility. He resists classification, and so I fixate on those actions that fall outside the boundaries I would prefer to assign. That will serve as a partial hypothesis, but it leaves open the matter of timing.”

“So it does,” Eskander says, thoughtful. “What can you tell me about the circumstances surrounding these occurrences?”

Incredulous, Wolfe looks up at Eskander, one eyebrow arching up. The look on his father’s face is one of a Scholar in the driest of academic meetings, at least until lips and eyes alike twitch in mirth.

“Not,” Eskander clarifies with exaggerated solemnity, “any lurid details of your intimacies with Niccolo. I trust that you can provide an adequate summary that omits such particulars.”

“Very well,” Wolfe says, pausing for effect. “Each incident occurred while Nic and I were in the same room. Physical contact occurred, at which point the memories intruded.”

Smiling, he plucks a macaron from the plate, only to see that his father, with his same smile, has done likewise. Humor, as it turns out, is another point of commonality between them.

Wolfe eats slowly and washes the sweet confection down with tea, as much to give himself time to consider the question as anything. His hands feel oddly insubstantial, but they hold steady. This is, as usual, the easier part. The vivisection of his memory is over, leaving him raw and hollowed out, but relieved. All that remains is to find its barbed quills in his mind, and if not extract them, at least mark their presence so that they can be left undisturbed.

“There are a few relevant points of commonality,” he says as he returns his cup to its saucer. “And I am a fool for failing to recognize the pattern sooner. I couldn’t _see_ him. Such a simple, _stupid_ thing.”

He doesn’t volunteer the details. It’s all so obvious, looking back on it. Standing at the kitchen sink, elbow deep in dishes and warm hands on his shoulders. Sprawled face-down on the bed, tension melting from his muscles under Nic’s touch. Lying on his side, back pressed against a broad and muscular chest, fingers trailing down his stomach. Moments of tenderness. Comfort. Peace. All ruined by his broken brain behaving like a damned infant’s and losing certainty of that which he could not see. Warning him of a risk that no longer exists with memories he does not want.

“I wouldn’t call it stupid,” Eskander says gently. “Right now, I am entertaining the possibility that you are a figment of my imagination. Not seriously, but the thought is always there.”

“How flattering,” Wolfe says, but he extends his hand across the table all the same. He knows it to be something that helps when the line between truth and illusion grows thin, and he is beginning to suspect that his father needed tonight's meeting as much as he did.

Eskander’s grip is strong, but not overly tight. Like Wolfe, he has learned to hide the need for contact. The sleeve of his shirt slides back, and the silver band that he wears on his wrist catches the light, gleaming. They’re gaining popularity among the Obscurists, these silver bands and the promise that they represent; a small sign of a world much changed. 

They share a look of recognition, and Eskander sits back. “The things we learn to live with,” he says with a shake of his head. “Will you be all right? Living with this?”

“I think so,” Wolfe says, if only because he refuses to let something this idiotic get the better of him. “There are enough ways to manage it, I think.”

“I’m sure there are, and Niccolo can help. You will tell him about this, won’t you?” Eskander asks, a question Wolfe hears often enough to be tired of it. 

“Believe me, he’s noticed,” Wolfe says, dry as bone.

“You know what I mean.”

“What am I supposed to say? When you embrace me from behind, I think of my torturer tending my wounds? I’m not telling Nic that.” The words come out sharp, and more than a little petulant. He’s too raw, too wrung out to care.

“No, but given your talent for rhetoric, you’ll find a way to discuss the subject in less sensational terms,” Eskander says. Easy for him to sound so sure. He won’t have to see the pain in Nic’s eyes when the meaning of all those carefully chosen words registers.

The very thought of it is exhausting to contemplate. Stifling a yawn, Wolfe says, “Yes, Father, I will talk to him, but for the love of all the gods shut up about it.”

Eskander laughs at that. Soft and knowing and warm. “Very well. What do you think of that French drama your boys are printing?”

Wolfe thinks it is a welcome change of topic, not to mention a sign that the gods have a truly bizarre sense of humor. He could not possibly have predicted that the same invention would nearly destroy him, then give him an unruly brood of children and discussions of French literature with his father. He’d hoped to change the Library. He could never have imagined the path that change would follow or the shape the world would take in its wake. Hope is a fragile thing for Wolfe, thin as blown glass, sharp-edged and too long starved, but he is beginning to think it might all work out for the better.

What he says is, “Passably entertaining. Certainly better than the American drivel from the last print run. Have you had the chance to read it?”


End file.
